February 21, 2024
“Following the anniversary of the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act, legislation that would create a federal prohibition on paramilitary groups through civil and criminal enforcement,” a Raskin press release announced. “The prohibition would hold individuals liable who directly engage in certain types of conduct, including intimidating state and local officials, interfering with government proceedings, pretending to be law enforcement, and violating people’s constitutional rights, while armed and acting as part of a private paramilitary organization.”
The “justification” offered cited the January 6, 2021, Capitol protest. That right there tells you they’ve got ulterior motives, because had the protestors been what Markey and Raskin are trying to scare voters into thinking they were — armed, organized, and trained — the results of that day would have been very different.
That’s not the only bit of conflation. No Democrat smear job would be complete without portraying Second Amendment defenders as “white supremacists” representing “the forces of bigotry, hatred, and violent extremism,” and “using political violence to intimidate our people.”
And that’s expected rhetoric for these Democrats, well versed in gaslighting to mask motives. Raskin is the son of the founder of the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies who defends his father’s Soviet ties, and Markey has been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. As a relevant aside, the DSA devoted a page on their website, until they took it down to try to hide it, to “solidarity songs glorifying their “struggle,” with “inclusive” lyrics like:
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“Are you sleeping, Are you sleeping, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie, And when the revolution comes,
We’ll kill you all with knives and guns, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie.”
So, it’s no coincidence that neither of these apparatchiks ever saw a gun they didn’t want to grab, and while a large part of their political careers has centered on undermining the right of the people to keep and bear arms as individuals, it’s no surprise to see them employing the same tactics to forbid the citizenry from freely associating with friends and neighbors to provide for the common defense when government either cannot, will not, or becomes responsible for threats to life and liberty.
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Here’s the “dangerous conduct” they say their bill will “prohibit”:
- publicly patrolling, drilling, or engaging in harmful or deadly paramilitary techniques
- interfering with or interrupting government proceedings
- interfering with the exercise of someone else’s constitutional rights
- falsely assuming the functions of law enforcement and asserting authority over others
- training to engage in such behavior
Each one of those abridgements leaves wide latitude for “interpretation” to prohibit all kinds of lawful conduct consistent with text, history, and tradition as understood by the Founders. It’s not hard to see some Democrat judge upholding a ban on Appleseed events, or military reenactments. The Christian news site Protestia notes the bill “would criminalize armed church security” because it “defines a paramilitary group as any group of 3 or more persons who function under a command structure as a ‘security services unit.’”
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As for interfering with government proceedings, it’s evident whose side Markey and Raskin would have taken in the “Battle of Athens,” when WWII veterans in McMinn County, TN, prevented a corrupt administration backed by thug “law enforcement” from confiscating ballot boxes and stealing an election.
Who else but armed citizens can keep violent lawlessness in check in times of disaster, especially if prolonged, when “official” responders are overwhelmed and unavailable, and the people are on their own? It’s fair to wonder what kind of civilization-hating lunatic would mandate people to be totally untrained, unprepared, and fearful of defending themselves in such an eventuality lest they be punished once sanctioned enforcers finally turn up.
What happened with the Militia of the several states, prescribed by the Constitution and recognized by the Second Amendment as “necessary to the security of a free State”?
Over time, politicians, whose fortunes and ambitions were beholden to the national government, found it to their advantage and profit to treat that with deliberate indifference and ignore their responsibility to organize them. At the same time, the citizens, pursuing their own private economic and political interests, abdicated their right and duty to participate to where now, few are even aware, fewer would want anything to do with it, and most of the rest have been conditioned to believe “militias” are the province of violent, low tooth-to-head ratio extremists.
Most don’t know – and gun banners exploit this – that the Militia Act of 1903 (the Dick Act), which replaced the 1792 Militia Acts, did not replace the Militia with the National Guard. The Subcommittee on the Constitution of the United States Senate, Ninety-Seventh Congress, noted that had been established by Congress “under its own power to raise armies, expressly stating that it was not doing so under its power to organize and arm the Militia.”
As with the National Guard, state guards, promoted by the State Guard Association of the United States, are select militias, something the Founders considered with the same distrust as a standing army.
What about the “unorganized militia” of United States Code, “which consists of the members of the Militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia”?
According to lawyer and Constitutional scholar Dr. Edwin Vieira, that classification is an example of Congressional “malfeasance… beyond the pale.
“Under no circumstances may Congress leave the Militia unorganized, unarmed, or undisciplined–let alone knowingly and intentionally impose such conditions,” Vieira instructs. The very term is “an oxymoron,” he shows.
But Congress has – some members knowingly, some intentionally, and some ignorantly. And the people, through lack of knowledge and apathy, have made their “choice,” many not aware that one was even offered. Without hyperbole, although the freedom prohibitionists will scoff and ridicule at the notion as “rightwing” paranoia, that choice has potential to result in ruination, catastrophe, terror, misery, slavery, and death.
It’s not like “private militias” were unheard of at the time of the colonial rebellion against the British government. Vermont’s Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were instrumental in resisting New York’s territorial claims in New Hampshire before joining up with the Continental Army in its continued “insurrection” against the Crown.
Speaking of Vermont, per AP, the state “made it a crime to own or operate paramilitary training camps in the state after Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed legislation introduced in response to a firearms training facility built without permits that neighbors called a menace.” Naturally, a Giffords spokesflack was quoted crowing about “25 other states that prohibit firearms training for anti-government paramilitary activity” and calling it “a commonsense policy that will help reduce the spread of dangerous, illegal, and anti-government firearms intimidation.”
The issue as far as Raskin and Markey’s latest affront to liberty goes, is that nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government delegated authority to ban paramilitary activities. They are usurping power – or trying to. And though Raskin cites authority including the Supreme Court’s admission in Heller “that the Second Amendment ‘does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary organizations,’” it would be interesting to see how that would hold up against the more recent Bruen standard of the understanding at the time of the Founding. Especially noting historical examples like Allen, or more to the point, Capt. John Parker at Lexington Green…
Even were the Militia system in place, history provides examples of that authority being contested in the War of 1812, when some governors would not call forth the Militia except to defend their own states.
Nullification was not a power that applied only to juries. It goes to the heart of refusal to obey orders deemed unlawful. James Madison, in Federalist No. 46, anticipated not just nullification on the part of the Militia, but outright resistance if warranted, writing, “Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger.”
While the Second Amendment does not specifically articulate a right to rebellion, The Ninth and Tenth Amendments, along with the commitment made in the Declaration of Independence “[t]hat whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” makes Founding intentions clear. While there is an authority “for calling forth the Militia to … suppress Insurrections,” that’s a power we’ve seen has been deliberately “disappeared.”
And true, before it had, Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion failed. But to conclude those outcomes invalidate the concept of citizens banding together in common defense is a logical fallacy that promotes the Star Trek Borg assertion that “Resistance is futile.”
If that’s the case, we might as well surrender right now.
Those who would tell you that know better. Otherwise, they’d issue a Dianne Feinstein-style “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,” blanket gun ban order. That they won’t (yet) shows the Second Amendment is working as a deterrent to totalitarianism just by its existence, and the remarkable system envisioned by the Founders still provides means of peaceable resolution.
That’s borne out on Govtrack.us, a website that tracks Congressional bills.
It’s “Prognosis” for Raskin’s H.R. 6981: “Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act of 2024” is that it has “1% chance of being enacted,” and gives the same result for Markey’s S. 3589: “A bill to amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit unauthorized private paramilitary activity, and for other purposes.”
It’s those “other purposes” more Americans need to be questioning.
Especially now that open borders are allowing thousands of military age men to pour across, many from regimes hostile to America. They could be Islamists committed to the destruction of “The Great Satan” through mass casualty terror attacks. There are also reports of significant increases Chinese nationals now estimated in the tens of thousands. Belligerents would be capable of acting like a Trojan Horse force, causing strategic critical infrastructure disruptions (power grid, communications, water supplies, wildfires, and biotoxins).
Raskin, Markey, and their fellow travelers in undermining “the security of a free State” recall a quote by Renaissance poet and inventor Sir John Harington, who observed, “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.”
It’s past time to start calling it what it is.
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